Girl of My Dreams (66 page)

“Ecstasy” was a strange word to use, I thought, but I let it go. “What happened in San Francisco,” I said, “was already violent for a good two months before the police opened fire on the strikers. Courage was needed, and she had enough to give a talk in public.” “A defiant talk,” he said, “a very political talk in a time of vicious politics, a polarizing talk when the sides are poles apart. A mature adult knows dry leaves need only a tiny spark to set them ablaze.” “Okay,” I said, “but she didn't want to leave her daughter, her songwriting, even me, dammit, she didn't want to leave me.”

He took a deep breath, having stepped away from being my analyst to advocating for the death instinct. “I'm not blaming her,” he said, “I blame her killer of course. A terrible crime, an unfathomable loss. I'm telling you only that she may have had feelings of welcome concerning death itself. There is a ripeness that comes to fruit ready to drop off the tree. The song ‘Born Blue,' risqué connotations combined with deep melancholy.”

“She was working for some kind justice, campaigning for it.”

“Yes, but she was also in open rebellion against neglectful parents—the Church, the studio, an unfair political climate, perhaps against the domination of men.” It sounded to me as though he was trying to synthesize Marx and Freud; perhaps the endless uncivil war between the followers of each was being waged in Dr. Pogorzelski himself. “I can venture,” he said, “that in the unconscious there are no accidents. I'm not telling you she wanted to die, only that what you do now with her death will probably be to re-order its meaning. To think of her murderer, for instance, as trying to deprive you of her. How is her death affecting you?”

“Awful. I feel awful,” I said, indignant but also tearful. “I've never felt so besieged by, I don't know, the gods, fate. Abandoned.”

“Abandoned? Again … ?”

“Yes, for Christ's sake.”

“This is what I mean,” he said. “You say she didn't want to die yet you feel abandoned by her. Another interpretation for the flower you dreamed of with the sick petals. Palmyra held the wilted flower as she vanished into the sea. You were already afraid of losing her when you didn't yet even have her. Perhaps in your unconscious she gave herself up for you in order to show you how to count for something, substituted her own death for yours.”

“Have it your way.” I stopped for a moment as I considered his drift, the concept of sacrifice. I found myself weeping. “But she did not goddamn intend to die,” I blurted.

“I'm talking about the possibilities in your unconscious, a place where she has now joined all the dead, especially the prematurely dead.”

Dry-eyed, I asked him about the unconscious itself, its meaning.

“What do you mean its meaning?” he said. “You know the unconscious is what we have either schooled ourselves to forget or not yet permitted through the doorway of awareness. Either way, this is repression.”

“I know the conscious mind of Palmyra Millevoix doesn't exist any more. It's as dead as the rest of her.”

“That's right,” he said. “Of course.”

“But what about the unconscious?” I asked. “If the unconscious isn't conscious, how do we know it dies too?”

“We don't know where the unconscious goes. Is it merely a function of the conscious mind that we haven't yet been granted access to, or is it a separate entity with its own independent existence? Are we finally dreaming, or are we being dreamed? Next time, Owen, see you next time. So sorry for your loss.”

But something made me want to turn the tables on him. “Wait a minute,” I said. “You're aggressive today. Her death bothers you. Are you angry yourself?”

“Goddamn right I am,” Dr. Pogorzelski said.

Elise Millevoix had insisted that everything on Stage Eight be draped in white for her sister. “Death is not black,” she told me. “It's everything bleached, it's the whitest of whiteness.” The casket itself, placed on a raised floor of the set where Nils and Pammy had been shooting their picture, was covered in white silk with a blue fleur-de-lys on it. Pammy never claimed Frenchness in particular, but the prop department had already been given Yeatsman's adaptation of
Madame Bovary
, in which Pammy was to star, and they were confecting various Gallic emblems. “A fleur-de-lys is a hell of a lot better than a Red Star anyway,” Yeatsman mumbled as we walked in together. The microphone was so close to the casket that the speakers could hardly escape the impression that they were being judged by its occupant. Finishing a medley of Millevoix songs, the Jubilee studio orchestra segued into the Third Brandenburg Concerto's first movement.

Wagons of flowers had been trucked to the studio by Obie Joyful from the Zangwills' lush hyperbole of a garden. Harry Bridges sent tulips and a thank-you note. From Washington President and Mrs. Roosevelt sent yellow roses and purple violets. From London Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald sent red and white roses, and from Paris Andre Malraux, as if knowing what Elise Millevoix wanted for her sister, sent a bouquet of white lilies. Unaccountably, since their politics were so far from Pammy's, both William Randolph Hearst and Benito Mussolini had dispatched garlands to honor the fallen star. FDR's and Malraux's messages were notable, the former's mostly because it was from The White House. Goddard Minghoff read aloud from the tributes. “Mrs. Roosevelt and I will forever gratefully recall,” the president (or his ghostwriter) said, “the melodic sweetness and captivating charm Palmyra Millevoix brought to a nation recovering hope in a time of unprecedented calamity.” Malraux simply quoted himself, or his publishers did, in English: “The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.” To which the great author, in the midst of his own leftist period, added, “
Bon voyage, ma petite tourterelle engagée.
”

At least six hundred of Jubilee's contract employees crowded Stage Eight. Mossy was in the front row with Esther Leah, two people sitting next to each other looking as though they were on opposite sides of the country. Two hundred additional seats were set aside for honored guests, mostly from the Hollywood community. Jack Warner wasn't there—no sentimentalist, he would not give up a Saturday polo match—but Louie Mayer was never one to pass up an opportunity to shed righteous tears. Mervyn Gallant had wheedled his way past the guards, steering his Hispano Suiza onto the lot where Joey Jouet had worked until he was fired and, on his last day, bestowed his final act of kindness by fixing the old silent picture director's flat tire prior to pitching himself off the Santa Monica Pier. “A vocalist who'll be greatly missed,” Gallant said to no one in particular as he entered Stage Eight, “only wish I could have used her myself.” Hurd Dawn also came back to pay his respects to a woman he adored, and I was pleased to see him wearing the old cape that had made him look so majestic I had taken him for Amos Zangwill himself my first day on the lot. Hurd embraced Elise, enfolding her in his cape.

The musicians and composers contingent would have pleased Pammy. Duke Ellington was playing at the Cocoanut Grove, so he was there, as were Benny Goodman, Dorothy Field, Jack Teagarden, and Russ Columbo, who had less than two months to live before his own mysterious gunshot death. Columbo came in with his girlfriend Carole Lombard as all heads turned. They stayed turned while Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, both in town composing picture scores, walked in together.

Bravely, Teresa Blackburn gave the first eulogy. Sensibly, she addressed the casket. “Dear darling Pammy,” she said, “what times we had, and should have had. I want to raise a child as you were raising Millie, and learn from you as I learned about my profession, and about personal life, and public life, and about love, from you. You were stolen from us so cruelly it is hard to see any divine hand behind the brutal act. Please help us to carry on in your spirit, your name, with your principles. Anything I ever do that's good will be because I knew you, dearest Pammy.”

Prominent friends and colleagues briefly recalled the first time they had met Pammy, and how it was to work with her, and how they missed her. When it was Mossy's turn he walked to the microphone wearing large sunglasses to hide his black eye and perhaps the sting of remorse. Often he reminded me of a cannibal; today he was a defrocked bishop, shamed and using his sunglasses as an unsuccessful disguise. “What happened this week at Jubilee Pictures,” he began, “is not only sad and terrible, it is beyond my understanding, beyond all meaning. This taking of Palmyra Millevoix hits all of us where we live most profoundly, and we live most profoundly in our hearts. What can we say or do as we begin to begin again, as we struggle to find any consolation, anything that will comfort us? I can't say I know the answer. I can say Palmyra Millevoix was passionate about her work. I believe she would want us to carry on with ours, and carry on we will.”

Listening to Mossy, I wondered who he had dragooned into helping him with this. Maybe for once no one. Did he have any idea how mad she had been at him when she died? He might have. “It's no secret”—he said as I held my breath for a confession, which those around me seemed also to do—“that Pammy and Jubilee had a falling out recently. We wanted what we wanted, and she wanted what she wanted. But these were family quarrels, that's all, and she was working diligently and brilliantly on this very stage, almost finished with a new picture, until two days ago. The last time we spoke I offered her Grushenka in
The Brothers Karamazov
. She accepted eagerly. How wonderful she'd have been in that great role.”

The assemblage sagged. Far from an acknowledgment of an affair or even of something as mundane as a new contract, this seemed a blatant lie, possibly made up on the spot. But was it? Who ever knew with Amos Zangwill? He wound up with a little couplet, stretching out every syllable, letting someone else express his feelings so he wouldn't have to reveal them in front of Esther Leah. Possibly he was trying to soothe the anger of the coffin's tenant, apologize to her. ‘“No more will linger down the days The flowing wonder of her ways.' I yield now to Jubilee's own Yancey Ballard, who tells me where to go when he feels I'm out of line, and who wrote Pammy one of the finest roles she ever had in
The Mill on the Floss
. Yancey talked me into letting the novel's unhappy ending stand, and he was right even though the picture sank without a trace. Sometimes, as we all know today to our sorrow, endings do have to be unhappy.”

His cud chewed, his whole body slouching, Mossy returned to his seat.

Yeatsman was the final speaker. He stood silently, staring at the casket for a long moment, and I wasn't sure he could speak at all, he seemed so consumed with rage and grief. “If we are believers,” he commenced, “it is hard not to impute to the Almighty a malign intent at such a time. How could he, if he even bothers to exist anymore, let this happen? How in the name of himself could he take her from us? Oh God.”

Yancey heaved a sob, and I thought he couldn't continue, but after a pause he summoned his chivalry. “Music is as natural as breathing, as eloquent as prayer; it's how we praise creation, mourn, rejoice. Pammy's music is about delight, sadness, love, loss, sometimes all the emotions in the same room at the same moment. Her music now outlasts her, reminding us of what we had, what we lost.”

He put his hand on the casket and patted the white silk covering it. “A studio head,” Yancey said, now winding himself up, “and I'll be uncharacteristically charitable enough not to name him except to quiet your fears by revealing he has nothing to do with Jubilee, recently called Palmyra Millevoix a Red bitch. I'll tell you something. This Red bitch could sing. This Red bitch could write, and this Red bitch could act. This Red bitch could turn a braggart into a mouse, and this Red bitch could also turn a man into a giant, and she could turn him back into a cricket whose measly chirp, whose squeak, was that of a bully who had learned his lesson. A number of you out there know firsthand what I'm talking about.” Some squirming was visible, and appreciative titters were heard.

“In this room,” he continued, “on this sound stage she worked, in this town where we are all geniuses, each of us believing himself or herself to be in possession of more brilliance than the person in the next chair—go ahead, look around, you're better than any of the others, aren't you?—and at the same time assailed by doubts and even by the conviction that all we're doing is fooling our betters who will any day now spot us for the untalented impostors we truly are, which of us knows a star or a musician or a singer or a picture-maker who is not vain? As we pay our respects here to a woman who scorned and mocked vanity, we do well to remember that this occasion is only the frightened tithe we offer death, the wily thief lying in wait to rob all of us of everything we have.”

Yeatsman finished as a hush fell over the usually noisy throng of egotists, now as silent as just before a take. “All of us are inflated with illusions,” he said. “That is our sin. Pammy had no illusions. That, perhaps, was hers. She had been cured of illusions long before we knew her. Instead of conceit and selfishness, she shared her gifts, her talent for living and loving. She was our graceful swan, comely, elegant, her voice the voice of an angel with sex appeal, her song the song of gentle breezes through trees in leaf, of water playing over pebbles. Who can be here today and not complain with my own hero William Yeats of a fire in our heads? Enough. We can only hope with the Irish bard that our Pammy has found the other wild swans, where she may glide free

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.”